These two types of assessment were used as enrichment activities and will be on display for the schools social studies night. Teaching two subjects makes creating assessment seem like a full time job, however, with this assessment we were able to easily adapt it so we were not recreating the wheel for both grade levels. This assessment ended up being a huge hit with these kids. Honestly, the idea of teaching gifted and talented students was overwhelming, and can often make me feel like I am just trying to keep up with the incredibly fast pace of these students. With this assessment, however, it allowed for a lot of student inquiry based projects that allowed students to explore their areas of interest, be creative, and apply the knowledge they have gained since the beginning of the year in a cumulative, project-based assessment. Students had to create in-depth tri-fold file folders that showed their research skills, the use of an MLA bibliography, and the analysis of information all within the same project. These high level assessments that gave, especially this group of students, guided and independent work encouraged creativity and more risk-taking because a lot of the project was open-ended and left up to the students to decide. This was one of the main goals of this assessment because a lot of these students are perfectionists in their work and will follow a rubric or syllabus to the "T" and very rarely will they take risks because they are afraid of failure. Encouraging risk taking and giving credit for creativity allowed students to think outside of the box and apply interdisciplinary skills especially between both social studies (content and research skills) and english language arts (bibliography, writing skills, research skills)
These two types of assessment were used as enrichment activities and will be on display for the schools social studies night. Teaching two subjects makes creating assessment seem like a full time job, however, with this assessment we were able to easily adapt it so we were not recreating the wheel for both grade levels. This assessment ended up being a huge hit with these kids. Honestly, the idea of teaching gifted and talented students was overwhelming, and can often make me feel like I am just trying to keep up with the incredibly fast pace of these students. With this assessment, however, it allowed for a lot of student inquiry based projects that allowed students to explore their areas of interest, be creative, and apply the knowledge they have gained since the beginning of the year in a cumulative, project-based assessment. Students had to create in-depth tri-fold file folders that showed their research skills, the use of an MLA bibliography, and the analysis of information all within the same project. These high level assessments that gave, especially this group of students, guided and independent work encouraged creativity and more risk-taking because a lot of the project was open-ended and left up to the students to decide. This was one of the main goals of this assessment because a lot of these students are perfectionists in their work and will follow a rubric or syllabus to the "T" and very rarely will they take risks because they are afraid of failure. Encouraging risk taking and giving credit for creativity allowed students to think outside of the box and apply interdisciplinary skills especially between both social studies (content and research skills) and english language arts (bibliography, writing skills, research skills)